Jungleland

This dire and dreamy road movie is impressive work from director and co-writer Winkler (he co-wrote with Theodore Bressman and David Branson Smith).

Winkler, and featuring three very strong central performances and eye-catching poetic visuals, Jungleland is more of a mood-piece than anything else, and on that level it works beautifully. The mood is strange, sad, and hypnotic.

Earnest fraternal affection is the main attraction in Jungleland, director Max Winkler’s moody road-trip movie by way of a bare-knuckle boxing drama.

Brits Hunnam, O’Connell and Barden are strangely well cast as its all-American grifters. (Hunnam in particular gives a finely tuned performance as a washed-up smooth talker who still knows how to flirt.)

Director Max Winkler truly seems to believe that he’s cutting to the heart of the boulevard of broken dreams.

It’s the kind of enterprise that has everything but a single fresh idea, or even moment. ... The sombre tone feels forced rather than earned, because everything here comes out of The Giant Golden Book Of Coulda Beena Contenda Cliches.

The sweaty clichés enacted along the way are uniformly tired and ultimately offensive. A love scene near the movie’s finale, Winkler’s vision of sex among the underclass, is a caricature that could comfortably fit in the new “Borat” movie.

Good entertaining movie. I recommend watching this on Netflix. It had a unpredictable ending too.

It starts off well, you get interested in it, but it slowly starts to fade out, and never recovers, and that's a real shame because the good acting work of Jack O'Connell and Charlie Hunnam is wasted. It doesn't become a bad film of course, but it never reaches a level worthy of something more significant.

Jack O’Connell plays a sensitive bare-knuckle boxer and Charlie Hunnam is his misguided **** manager/brother. To pay **** debt, they travel cross country with a young woman on what becomes a personal drama featuring 3 stereotypes (she’s the troubled misfit with a secret). At almost every turn, older brother makes yet another mistake that puts their exploits into deeper trouble. Above all of this mess are the attempts at making their relationships touching. The actors are doing fine, but director Max Winkler never ramps up the drama to create any real empathy. It doesn’t help that so much of the narrative is transparent.

This movie is a miss. As a viewer I'm not made to have any incentive to be interested in these characters. It's a slow story that leaves you with plenty of time to think 'what are you even doing with your life sitting here watching this terrible movie?' Once I had that realization I had to turn it off and write this review so that some can hopefully avoid loosing the time spent watching this and making the same mistake I did.